Nlle Zelande Nlle Hollande

Author Louis Auguste de Sainson (French, 1801 - 1887)

Date1833

Object number00056233

NameLithograph

MediumPaper

DimensionsOverall: 341 × 530 mm

ClassificationsBooks and journals

Credit LineAustralian National Maritime Museum Collection Purchased with the assistance of the Louis Vuitton Trust Fund

Terms

DescriptionA hand-coloured lithograph by Louis Auguste de Sainson depicting two Indigenous Australian dwellings, one from Jervis Bay and the other from King George’s Sound, and two Māori dwellings from New Zealand. These were illustrated from Dumont d’Urville’s 1826–29 voyage to the South Pacific in the ASTROLABE.HistoryLed by Dumont d’Urville, the ASTROLABE expedition encompassed a voyage throughout the South Pacific over 1826-29. It visited Australia (New Holland), Tasmania, New Zealand, Tonga, Fiji, new Britain, New Guinea, Amboina, Vanikoro and Guam. This voyage collected a vast amount of biological and ethnographic information and specimens, resulting the production of an exquisite and extensive series of published accounts and illustrated atlases. This account highlights ways in which non-British voyagers viewed and represented the Pacific Ocean after the establishment of several Australian colonies (New South Wales, Van Diemen’s Land and Swan River Colony), but prior to the significant expansion of free settlement around Australasia in the mid-late 1830s (South Australia, Port Phillip Colony, New Zealand). The French at this time had neither the means nor the strategic power to mount major colonial projects. Therefore, their understanding of First Nations cultures – including Indigenous connections to lands and seas – stands in contrast with the perspective of Britain as the world’s pre-eminent industrial economy and maritime power. The works were also created in the aftermath of the first decades of frontier violence in the Australian colonies. This was a time of growing Colonial Office consternation about the human and political consequences of colonisation, in addition to the mounting anti-slavery campaign and Christian agitation for more considerate treatment of Indigenous peoples around the British Empire. SignificanceThis particular lithograph is especially signifgicant in that it presents two Aboriginal and two Māori huts in juxtaposition. As such it suggests a sense of equivalence between the two littoral cultures, focused on similar representations of structures, tools and domestic items. It conveys a strong sense of settlement and local connection with land and environment, in contrast with terra nullius views which emptied the landscape of First Nations peoples.

This is an important perspective in the period just prior to concerted European colonisation of New Zealand from the late 1830s, a process soon tempered by Britain’s Colonial Office as a direct result of the perceived decimation of Aboriginal culture in the Australian colonies.